Brian Kirk's Blog

Freedom in Constraint is a sequence of formal poems focusing on the themes of isolation and social distancing and the wider issues and challenges to community and family arising out of the current Covid 19 pandemic.

The second poem in the sequence is also a sonnet Planting. Again, my daughter Martha has made a short film to accompany the poem which you can view below.

I hope to upload new poems every week or so until I reach the end of the sequence. I hope you enjoy. Stay safe!

Brian Kirk,

Dublin

10th June 2020

Acknowledgements

Freedom in Constraint is a sequence of formal poems responding to life during the Covid 19 crisis and is made with support from the Arts Council of Ireland / An Comhairle Éalíon’s Covid 19 Response Award.

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Despite all the current upheaval it’s great to see South Dublin Libraries using technology to bring resources to emerging writers. I’m delighted to be hosting 8 half-hour one-to-one sessions with emerging fiction writers later in April. The closing date to apply to be one of the 8 is Sunday 12th April so get going. Full details available here

I was of course disappointed not to get to read at North West Words in Letterkenny on 26th March, but I do hope to get there later in the year when things have settled down.

Despite all the worry and the strange atmosphere out there people have been quick to use technology and social media in a positive way as a means of keeping in touch while keeping our distance. The Holding Cell is a great resource dreamed up by writing couple Rozz and Simon Lewis: virtual literary readings by writers during the Covid19 Pandemic . They have had some excellent writers reading their work over the past few weeks, including Danielle McLaughlin, William Wall, Belinda McKeown, Colin Barret and Madeleine Darcy, to name only a few. I was delighted to read some poems also and you can see that reading here.

I hope to do a fiction reading later in the month also. In the meantime you should sit back and enjoy the wealth of talent already available at http://www.theholdingcell.eu/readers/

I hope you can use some of your enforced home time to engage with the written word over the coming weeks. As well as attending virtual readings, I’ve been reading some excellent poetry and thoroughly enjoyed Christine Dwyer Hickey’s novel Tatty (2020 Dublin One City One Book Choice), which is one of the best examples of the use of voice I’ve ever come across in a novel. I highly recommend it to everyone. At the moment I’m re-reading At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien. So don’t just rely on the TV and your phone. As Flann’s famous Uncle would say: “tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?”

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I’m delighted to say I’ve been invited to read at North West Words in Dillons Hotel, Letterkenny, on Thursday 26^th March 2020. North West Words has been host to some great poets in recent years, most recently the excellent Eleanor Hooker in February. They also run an annual poetry competition which I was pleased to be shortlisted for twice. I’ll be reading from my collection After The Fall (Salmon, 2017) and also some new poems which will form part of my second collection.  I’ll have copies of my poetry collection with me and also copies of my short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019) for sale on the night.

This is my first reading of 2020 and I’m very much looking forward to it!

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This year the Bray Literary Festival will be held on the weekend of 18^th – 20^th September 2020. We had our first preliminary meeting of the committee at the weekend and the call out for author applications just opened and will remain open until the 31^st March 2020. We’d love to receive as many applications as possible. Following that we will be programming the festival and preparing for this year’s competitions for poetry and flash fiction. We’re really looking forward to the 2020 Festival, which will be our fourth year since it was founded by Tanya Farrelly 2017. The success of the festival each year has been a great spur to create an ever more engaging programme year on year. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in September.

In the meantime, we are hosting a Fundraiser Pub Quiz on Wednesday March 11^th @ 7.30pm in Toner’s Pub, Lower Baggot Street, Dubin 2. €40 for a table of 4, which includes raffle tickets for great spot prizes. Do come along and test your general knowledge, have some fun and support a great festival which hosts over 40 writers in one weekend in the beautiful seaside town of Bray.

In the meantime check out https://brayliteraryfestival.com/ for updates.

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I didn’t publish quite as much in 2019 as in recent years, but there were some great moments along the way. The highlight was of course the publication of my short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You at the Cork International Short Story Festival in September. This is my third book publication in the past four years following 2015’s children’s novel The Rising Son and 2017’s poetry collection After The Fall (Salmon Poetry).

My main aim in terms of publication for 2020 is to find a publisher for my full short story collection What Do You Actually Want?. I was lucky enough to be mentored in 2019 by Dermot Bolger as I worked on putting the collection together.

In terms of new writing in 2020, I’m determined to bring at least one of two novel projects to fruition before the end of the year. I also got back into poetry writing in 2019 and hope to continue to work towards my second poetry collection in 2020 by continuing to write plenty of new poems and adding to my poetry publication credits.

Over the year I read some excellent novels, stories and poetry. I could name loads but I’ll settle for three only, one from each genre: Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, Nicole Flattery’s short story collection Show Them A Good Time and Ciaran O’Rourke’s poetry collection The Buried Breath. There were plenty of other wonderful books that I read during the year but these three stood out for me in terms of the dynamic coming together of structure, language and ideas.

Here’s how my writing year went from a publication point of view:

• My poem How You Lived Then was published in Issue 25 of Boyne Berries.
• My short fiction chapbook, It’s Not Me, It’s You was the winner of the inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition and was published in September 2019 by Southword Editions.
• I performed my Poem Evidence of Emotion on Poetry Day Ireland along with twelve other poets as part of an event responding to the exhibition “An Altered Land” by David Fox at Olivier Cornet Gallery in Great Denmark Street.
• In January I was longlisted for the Cambridge Short Story competition.
• My poem Knockout appeared in the Abridged Delete issue.
• My poem Capsized appeared in Flare Issue 12 Summer 2019.
• My short poem Komorebi appeard in Issue 29 of Shot Glass Journal in September 2019.
• My poem Bully was published in Issue 26 of Boyne Berries in September 2019.
• My poem Deepfake was published in Abridged Kassandra Issue in September 2019.
• My short story Urgent and Important was published in the Honest Ulsterman in October 2019.
• My four poem sequence Fear and Trembling was published in Live Encounters Poetry in December 2019.
• My poem Googling My Parents was published in Poetry Ireland Review Issue 129 and was Poem of the Week at RTE Media in December 2019.
• My short story Blood was accepted for publication by The Blue Nib and will be published in Issue 40 in January 2020.

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Last Thursday, 26th October 2019, Southword Editions published their first two Short Fiction Chapbooks: A Middle Eastern No by Jill Widner and It’s Not Me, It’s You by Brian Kirk (that’s me!).

Both publications are now available from Munster Literature Centre and Amazon. I hope both books gain many new readers and also some reviews over the coming weeks and months. I’m very proud of the three stories that appear in my chapbook and want to thank Southword Editions for doing such a great job in publishing them. I’d also like to thank the editors of the magazines and journals who published these stories originally.  That New Girl was published by Steve Moran, Willesden Herald New Short Stories in November 2018; The Shawl was published by Jen Matthews in Long Story Short Literary Journal in March 2013; The Invitation was published by Valerie Sirr in Issue 7 of The Lonely Crowd in June 2017.

I’d also like to acknowledge the support I received from South Dublin County Council Arts Office by way of a bursary in 2017 when I was writing these stories. My final and particular thanks go to John Murphy who has been a first reader and a vital critical eye for me for many years and t0 Dermot Bolger who mentored me during 2018 and 2019 as I prepared my full collection of short stories for which I am now actively seeking a publisher.

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The Cork International Short Story Festival 2019 starts tomorrow and I’m delighted to be taking part in it this year. My short fiction chapbook “It’s Not Me, It’s You” won the inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook Prize along with “A Middle Eastern No” by Jill Widner (Yakima, WA USA)  and both books will be launched as part of the festival on Thursday 26th September at 2.30pm at Cork City Library. I’m looking forward to meeting Jill and reading her work. We’ll both be reading from our chapbooks as part of the event which is free to the public. It would be lovely to see some of you there.

“It’s Not Me, It’s You” is already available to buy via Amazon if you can’t get to Cork. If you enjoy it, you might leave a short review also.

There’s a host of other events taking place during the festival which you can check out here. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Danielle McLaughlin and Clare Adam in conversation with Eimear Ryan, but there’s plenty more to keep short story lovers interested.

Then, straight after that, it’s straight back to Bray for the Bray Literary Festival! It’s all go at the moment…

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